Exchange or GMail?

I just got asked by my general manager to look into replacing our exchange boxes with Gmail. Can I ask what people here think about this? What are the advantages or disadvantages of going over to gmail?

Oh also Exchange offers multiple addresses/person, multiple e-mail domains/organization, shared calendars/tasklists/mailboxes/etc. etc. with any level of access and it all works off your domain permissions, groups etc. just as the file system does...

With GMail you have something that is free. Never a good sign. :)

Exchange is MS's flagship product. They continue to be successful with their Enterprise customers because nobody else offers real competition.

If you have more than a few computers, Gmail just isn't sane IMO.

Oh ALSO: Exchange has a very broad support base from Microsoft and in the community. www.msexchange.org, this site, a gazillion others. OTOH, Gmail has no support to speak of from the people who make it...Google is basically a search engine company that makes beta software of other types. I like them but they ain't competing with Microsoft in the e-mail category IMO.

Don't know what I can say, one is an outsourced service and one is a internal resource.

Exchange requires specialized maintenance, Google is just anyone with a browser.

Exchange you can control, protect, adjust and customize while Google is what it is..
and will be whatever they want it to be..

Maybe the government should start handling email services for us all..
But seriously, you don't get to see what messages are stuck in a queue, or provide redundancy, control your own limits or have public folders, just to touch on a few things..

All that being said, I like Google services, and I don't think it will go away..

I can see lots of companies throwing out their 2000, 2003 exchange servers and jumping on the google train, saving $.
Then I see people getting exchange or sendmail to overcome its limitations..
But many wont..

The question at a higher level is:

Is it worth outsourcing all services and taking the ASP model, or maintain your own data-center. Lots of reasons for going one way or the other, but security, flexibility, compatibility and control are the main reasons people switch..

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As far as most companies are concerned, you should be looking at the Google Apps Premium Edition, which costs $50 per user per year. It offers phone support as well as the email support of the free edition. As far as feature sets, between Exchange and Google Apps, Exchange wins. However, the difference is probably not an issue to many organizations.

If they're using Outlook, most end users have no clue about the difference between IMAP and MAPI, and they won't really recognize a difference if they were switched. The contacts and calendar sync tool keep those data synced between Outlook and Google Apps as well. For webmail users, the Google Apps interface is very intuitive. There are migration tools available for Exchange (As well as Lotus Notes for the truly pain loving).

Directory sync between your local AD and Google Apps is available. Additional spam, and Antivirus filtering is available through Postini. One of the best providers of Exchange filtering as well, I might add. Delegation, and archiving are coming to Google Apps as well.

To address your original question, your organization may see a cost reduction by switching from Exchange to Google Apps, if there is not a specific feature of Exchange that you need. You may also benefit from better uptime and lower support requirements. Disadvantages would be entrusting your data to the cloud, and not having physical access to administer your servers. A major one would be if you do have a LOB application that requires Exchange. It is more question for you or your management to determine what the needs of your organization are and what will fit. No one else can tell you what the perfect solution is, although many will try.

btw one more thing to consider with google: when they have problems, you're down.

otoh if you have an exchange server, when you have problems, you're down. :) However I think it's more difficult to work out ways for people to work offline with google apps? Maybe not, I'm not that familiar with it yet.

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